


Imperfect Specimen

by PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: Gen, Gore, Mind Control, Self Harm, Statement Fic, The Usher Foundation, canon typical spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 16:03:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20176993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid/pseuds/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid
Summary: Statement of Llewellyn Morgan. Regarding the donation of an unusual specimen jar to the Magnus Institute, originally resident in the archival basement of Shropshire County Natural History Museum. Recording by Kat Vandemeer, Assistant Archivist to the Usher Foundation. Statement begins.





	Imperfect Specimen

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the RQBB. Podfic by the lovely Oak_Leaf can be found here https://archiveofourown.org/works/20191831?view_adult=true 
> 
> and here https://throwaninkpot.tumblr.com/post/186934184090/imperfect-specimen-podficmp3 
> 
> they also did a moodboard! https://throwaninkpot.tumblr.com/post/186934202775/bonus-big-bang-gift-for-oswald-privileges-to-make

**KAT**

Statement of Llewellyn Morgan. Regarding the donation of an unusual specimen jar to the Magnus Institute, originally resident in the archival basement of Shropshire County Natural History Museum. Recording by Kat Vandemeer, Assistant Archivist to the Usher Foundation. Statement begins. 

**KAT [STATEMENT]**

I am not here because I changed my mind about your offer. 

I feel as though it’s important that you understand that. I like the job I’ve already got. It took a long time to get everything just how I like it, and I can work to my own schedule without oversight from people who think they know better. So, in spite of everything that’s happened to bring me here, I am not about to go abandoning that. 

And maybe if I fill in one of your forms and give you something for your archives, you’ll stop trying to drag me out of mine.

For all that we call ourselves after the county, I don’t think the museum building is actually in Shropshire. The turning is just after the “Welcome to” sign, but the road doubles back over the border almost immediately, meaning most visitors end up here by accident. Anyone actively trying to find us doesn’t seem to have a hope. So it’s not unusual for me to find myself standing at the turning, looking to wave down a delivery I’m expecting. It saves a lot of arduous conversation over the phone. 

Unfortunately, it also means that if a driver wants to just pull over, drop the donations on the pavement, and take off again, there’s very little I can do to stop them. And that’s pretty much exactly how that morning started. With me ankle deep in cardboard boxes, sheaves of string-bound papers, and bubble-wrapped display trays, shouting after a disappearing van. 

Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a stereotype of my profession, but doing delicate work for long hours indoors has certain drawbacks. I had to call the front desk and ask the receptionist to give me a hand. It’s not like it was her responsibility to come and help me- after all, her job description is visitor check-ins and answering the phone, not lugging crates of dead insects around. But on my own, I would have been trekking back and forth along the road all morning.

Still, there were no complaints from her. Just rather a lot of professionally chirrupy chatter. The obligation to make conversation is not one I shoulder with enthusiasm, but happily for the both of us, she seemed not to need her conversation partner to really say anything, or even give much of an indication that they’d been listening. All I had to do was occasionally say things like “Right” and “Mmhm” and “Please, please be careful with that.” 

She was the one to find the jar first. 

“Were you leaving this for me to carry?” She asked. It was probably a joke. I told her no, just in case it wasn’t. I hadn’t even seen the thing before she’d called me over to take a look.

“How could you have missed this?” She said, “It’s huge!”

She was right. It was maybe two feet tall, and bulky with it. A sealed specimen jar, poorly made and poorly maintained. The solution was a dullish, near-opaque brown, obscuring the specimen itself almost completely.

The receptionist didn’t seem phased by this. She was crouched on her heels, turning the jar back and forth. 

“What do you think’s inside it?” She asked.

Her fascination was beginning to irritate me. The jar wasn’t listed on my inventory, but then neither were half the items surrounding it. The other half that were listed were missing from the delivery entirely. Add to that the way that the specimen was floating and therefore clearly rotten, and it was like finding a dead mouse in your post. If the post was mostly addressed to someone else, and the mouse was starting to ooze. 

I let the receptionist know all of this, and finished by telling her that it didn’t matter what it had been to begin with, as by this point it was just a hazard and disposing of it was just another thing taking up space on my to-do list. 

I probably came off as rather terse. But I rather feel that bridge was never even built, let alone there to be burned. 

Here is what happened next; I remember relocating most of the donations to my darkroom to reduce any further light damage. I remember getting in the car, the trip to the waste centre, and I remember talking to the front desk worker, explaining the problem. I handed over the butterfly trays I had in the boot. He gave me a bit of a look, but was very polite as he explained that he didn’t think that there was any alcohol or formaldehyde in there, and that they didn’t accept material over the counter anyway. Besides, didn’t the museum already have a collection contract with the company? 

I already knew this, and told him so. Possibly less politely than he really deserved. Then I took the butterfly trays back, and drove away. 

Something had gone wrong somewhere, and I couldn’t work out exactly what. I turned the past half hour over in my head as I drove. Darkroom, car, front desk, butterflies - no step in that process was missing. But _ something _wasn’t there. Wasn’t right.

I missed the turning, as everyone does, and spent twenty minutes trying to find a place to turn around. By the time I got back, the mental itch was maddening. 

To make matters worse, I found the receptionist was in my workroom, waiting for me. Actually _ in _my workroom- not waylaying me at the front desk or hovering around the doorway, actually in there. I asked her what she thought she was doing. 

“I wanted to watch while you changed the alcohol,” she said, bright as anything, “If that’s okay?” 

Over her shoulder, the jar was squatting in the centre of my work bench.

I knew I had taken the thing to be destroyed. The jar wasn't listed-

No. No, I knew that I had gotten into the car, to go to the waste centre. That was not the same thing as knowing that I had taken the jar with me. I hadn’t, I obviously hadn’t. The proof was there, solid and filthy as ever. 

But I had _ decided _to destroy it. And then I had gotten into the car, with the butterfly trays. Somewhere between deciding and acting, something had gotten lost. Or, not lost. Cut. A taut thread of intent, or control, or direction, neatly split. 

Somehow, that idea felt so much worse. 

That realisation came coupled with another; I was still speaking. The receptionist was staring at me, attentive as a schoolchild, and I listened with her as my lungs and throat and tongue worked without my input. I was in the middle of promising her, or maybe asking for, or maybe ordering, “The other necessary things.”

If I had already said what those things were, I don’t remember. If I hadn’t, I didn’t want to allow it. My voice stumbled and died, and for a moment, my tongue was limp and alien in my mouth. I was intruding on myself. 

The feeling passed almost instantly, and at once I told her to get out of my archive. Those were my exact words. I do remember that. I know it wasn’t professional, and I know for certain that I hurt her feelings, but I _ needed _to be alone.

The receptionist retreated without a word, and I was left trying to work out what the hell had been happening to me all morning. Not for a minute did I think that I might be going mad, or that some form of early on-set dementia might be manifesting. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, but neither did I make a habit of doubting myself or my senses. Something had interfered, that much I couldn’t argue with. 

I needed to take another look at that jar. 

Trying to examine the thing was- strange. It was right there, in plain view, but- it’s difficult to explain. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see it, just that what I could see didn’t… prompt anything. No connections, no fear, no interest, nothing. And that wasn’t right, it’s very lack of wrongness was wrong, because everything you can see has a connection to something else. 

I sat in front of it, hands at the sides of my head to tunnel my vision, and _ looked_.

It was big, I could see that much. And it was sealed with rubber in a way that should have immediately called up the word “antique” or “old fashioned” or “obsolete”. But I can only add those words now, without it here in front of me. The seal also hid the central point of an expanding pattern of fractures. They spread outwards from the rim, and they didn’t look like anything other than the cracked glass of a jar.

The fluid inside was just as opaque, concealing the specimen it held. That, though, was something I could fix, with a bit of direct light. 

I looked up, reaching for the overhead lamp. 

I picked up a block of notecards from the shelf. The butterfly trays at the end of my work bench needed relabelling, but were otherwise in remarkably good condition. Perhaps they could form the centre point of a new exhibit. Not for too long, though, of course. Overexposure would ruin them completely. 

It wasn’t until I was driving home that I realised vaguely that it had happened again. A cut. The connection between what I had meant to do and what I had done had been severed. 

But by that time, well. Since the discrepancy didn’t cause any problems like it had at the waste centre, and my cassette player had just that moment decided to throw a fit, I was more concerned about the tape that was being chewed. After all, nowhere nearby sells the damn things any more. 

After that - and this is going to sound stupid, but - I just sort of forgot. I don’t know how much of it was the quiet severing of mental threads, but for the next few days, when I came into work and saw the jar on my workbench, or the floor, or up on a shelf, I would think, _ I really must get around to throwing that horrible thing away, _ and then I would go on to do something else. And when it vanished entirely, I didn’t even think that. 

It never sat quite right with me, but there were... other things to occupy my attention. At first it was just the usual work things - restoration, admin, trying to keep the photosensitives from fading too quickly. Then things started to go missing. First it was from the archives themselves; I would pick up a tray and find a handful of the pins no longer held their insects. Any inventory I tried to make would come up full of holes. Then the branch of mounted lorikeets that was the centrepiece of our exhibit on Non-Native Taxidermy vanished, and nothing was really done. We all just stood around, looking at the gap, and someone said something about phoning the police and then we all just… drifted away. 

And then there was the receptionist. At some point, she stopped showing up to work. It was generally agreed that she had left, had better prospects elsewhere, and there was some vague mention of setting up a leaving do. But since she seemed to have already gone, the idea sort of fizzled out. A replacement was hired, a boy barely out of his teens who typed at the speed of someone trying to win a slow bicycle race against a glacier. I think his name was Adam, or something.

I didn’t even know what the previous receptionist’s name had been. 

If anybody else felt the same unease as I did, they didn’t show it. I tried to talk to the general manager about the missing lorikeets, and then again when I first realised that I hadn’t seen the receptionist in a while, but she genuinely did not seem concerned. 

“Don’t worry about it,” was all she’d say to me, “Don’t worry about a thing.” 

I always worry about things. 

It was kind of a clever trick, really, all those little disruptions in the workplace. They distracted me from that nagging half awareness, the feeling that something was wrong. But it wasn’t enough. The lack of knowledge bothered me. It shifted in my head, unmoored, the itching ache of a loose tooth. 

Even so, a vague feeling wouldn’t have done me much good if I hadn’t spent so much time at work. It’s always been kind of habit of mine to stay longer than I really need to, to the point where in the winter months I doesn’t always get a chance to see the sunlight hours. It’s a point of much entertainment amongst my colleagues. I’m fairly sure they even make bets about it at times.

Still, the point remains that nobody knows the building better than I do, especially not its archives. They’re more of a home to me than the flat where I happen to sleep. I’m more comfortable surrounded by my papers and my specimens than I am anywhere else. 

Except I wasn’t any longer. Coming into work, shutting the door behind me - instead of relief, I would begin to feel almost claustrophobic. Only imperceptibly at first, but getting worse as the days inched by. It was like putting on a pair of shoes you’ve owned for years, only to discover that for no discernible reason, they’ve begun to pinch and give you blisters. 

When it got to the point where I found myself standing there, outside the door, wrist locked and physically willing myself to turn the handle, I decided that I’d had enough. 

Instead of setting to work and giving anything the opportunity to distract me, I put the back of a chair against the door, sat down, and looked at the room in front of me. Now that I was paying attention - _ really _paying attention - the feeling of something missing was stronger than ever. But nothing seemed to be actually out of place. Books on my desk, desk itself to my left. Specimens on the workbench and the lamp that hung overhead. Cabinets and cases to my right. The pattern of items didn’t change, no matter how many times I went over it.

Obviously I needed to try something else. 

I allowed myself a moment to fetch a pen and paper, an errand that had me organising and reorganising the books on my desk for nearly half an hour before I was able to drag my focus back to what I had intended to do. Then, without looking up, I made a list of what I should be able to see. Desk on the left, a list of the titles I knew were there. Another list of specimens, workbench and lamp in front of me, door to the darkroom beyond that. Three filing cabinets on my right, only two of which locked. Then I scanned the room, slowly, marking off what I saw against my list. 

I stayed in my archive for a long while that day, long after everyone else had gone home. The words I wrote on the page writhed in the corners of my vision, squirming from the grip of my memory the second I looked up. I would write things down twice, or not at all, and eventually have to start over again when the page became more crossing-out than word. 

I sat. I wrote. I checked. Crumpled paper forming a small pile around my ankles. 

And then - oh, _ then _\- I caught it. 

“Got you now, you little bastard,” I told it. “You can’t hide from me here.”

The handle to the door of the darkroom was covered in a very fine layer of dust. I hadn’t opened it in weeks, even as the butterflies and ink on paper faded right in front of me. Why would I? There had been nothing in my head to connect the need to use a darkroom and the fact that I had one. Another thread cut. 

I opened the door. 

The smell hit me first. Thick, and chemical, and dead. The greasy stink of formaldehyde. No time even to choke, though, because I was pulled in, and the door shut behind me. 

Whatever the jar had been doing to hide itself, hide this room, didn’t apply here. It distorted space like a huge weight, skewing the outline of everything towards it. The floor sloped upwards, the ceiling, down, the bench it rested on splintered under the pressure of it. I skidded towards it, impossibly, uphill. 

I flailed to keep my balance, and ran into resistance immediately. Strands of- what, fishing wire? Hair?- webbed out from the jar, strung with things I couldn’t make out at first. Dead insects and butterfly wings, photographs of people I recognised from work. Bright feathers that must have come from the stolen lorikeets. The strands all thrummed with a horrible, living energy, squirming against my vision like an afterimage. 

I could regain my footing, but not stop myself from stumbling towards the jar. The pressure of it’s pull, the weight of it, physically hurt to look at. The fluid inside wasn’t opaque any longer, but luminescent, like filthy amber, and I could finally see what was inside. 

A bundle of chitinous legs, suspended under a flattish mass the size of my palm, stretching and bumping against the glass. Gently shifting mouthparts causing flakes of dead matter to swirl in tiny eddies. A studding of blank, bead-like eyes. A spider. Not of any genus or species I could have named. More like someone had taken all the worst possible ideas of a spider, observable or imaginary, and jammed them together into one horrible, twitching creature. 

I am not afraid of spiders. But, confronted with the raw spider-likeness in that jar, somehow that didn’t matter in the slightest. 

My impossible upwards fall was brought to a halt. The jar didn’t take up any more room in my line of sight than it ought to, but I could see every detail of the thing inside it. It’s pedipalps weren’t moving idly. They were latching onto flecks of something that was drifting downwards through the fluid. With an effort of will, I forced my gaze upwards.

The receptionist was standing over the jar’s unsealed mouth. She bent and twisted with the warped dimensions of the room, but either it didn’t hurt her, or she didn’t care. Her hair hung down in patchy sheets, her scalp scabbed. 

She had a box cutter in one hand, and was carving slivers of flesh from her fingertips. They left a tiny ballooning trail of blood as they drifted down towards the waiting spider. 

I tried to call out to her, but my voice was swallowed immediately by the dead air. And, of course, I didn’t even know her name. I didn’t know anything, not how to move, how to blink, how to breathe. All ties between my mind and my body were cut, and with no connection, no strings to pull them, my limbs just hung there, useless. 

The receptionist kept carving away. 

I am not afraid of spiders. I was very, very afraid of the thing in the jar. The fear kept me paralysed, a familiar paralysis, the feeling I have after a nightmare. I wake and the terror is still real, some animal instinct keeping me locked still.

I am not afraid of spiders. 

_ Move_, I thought, _ move_. 

If I could move, then the nightmare would have lost. It’s logic would collapse, the whole structure would break up into a hundred odd-shaped pieces that never fitted together to begin with. Strange, but not frightening, only ever faintly ridiculous. _ Get up_, I told myself, _ Time to start the day. There is work to do. You don’t have time to be frightened. _

I still couldn’t move. I was being pumped full of fear as though it were venom, and that, I realised, that was important, because it was not my fear. And spiders do not kill their prey with similes. 

The thing in the jar was not a spider. It was inconsistent, contradictory mess. It didn’t matter whether it had eight eyes or six or four, so long as it had too many, whether it spun web or hunted, so long as it was a predator. If I were to take it from the jar and clean it and dry it and cut it open, I’d find no venom glands, no internal structure at all. It matched nothing, and it was not real.

And it was trying to _ frighten _me with that. 

It had invaded my archives, filled my memory and my inventory with holes, stolen a room from me to hide in, and then, as if that weren’t enough, it had the audacity to tell me that I should be _ scared _of it? Why? Because it was a made-up spider hiding a receptionist in my back room?

I was moving again, reaching for the jar. The ties were not longer cut, because that is not how brain and nerves and muscle work, not in the real world, and, for just a moment, not in this nightmare-world either. Just for a moment. The flare of anger that powered me was drowning already, overwhelmed by fear that wasn’t mine. 

The receptionist slammed into me, wrapping me in arms and wire and hair. My mouth was full of butterfly wings. But she must have been down here since she disappeared; her limbs were nothing but bone, and any strength she had came entirely from rage. I lunged forward and through the humming, living wire, and the jar shattered on the ground. 

The receptionist screamed, hurling herself at the spider-thing as it slithered across the floor. I hung onto her, not thinking about why or what to do next. Her howls thrummed along the wires and bit into my skin and I could do nothing but tighten my grip and wait.

The air contorted, and slowly, far too slowly, it relaxed. The receptionist was slumped in my arms, unmoving. It wasn’t until I had dragged her out into the electric light of the main room that I saw how much damage she’d done to my arms and side with her box cutter. Of course, I wasn’t until after I’d noticed it that it started to hurt. 

The next few hours were the cliche, post-trauma blur. Bandages from the first aid kit, helping her into the passenger seat, waiting at A&E. The receptionist barely moved the whole time, except when I directed her. Even if the cutting of ties wasn’t real for me, it seemed to have had a much worse effect on her. 

I returned to the museum in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t feel like having to explain my bandages to any of my co-workers, and I was hardly going to waste my time with the police. They might try to poke through my archive, and I already had enough cleaning up to do.

The darkroom was as I’d left it - strung with wire, smelling of formaldehyde. But that’s all it was, a tangle of garbage and a bad smell. Whatever power had been channelled, whatever awful weight the thing in the jar had had was gone.

Almost gone. The spider-thing still pulsed weakly as I scooped it out of the pool of fluid and broken glass and into a plastic container. Looking at it, it seemed kind of shrunken and vulnerable out in the open. 

I decided to take it to be incinerated with the rest of the rubbish. 

I cleared out everything that the receptionist had brought into my darkroom. The decorated strings of wire and hair, containers of chemicals and empty plastic tubs that seemed to have once held mealworms, all of it. I bagged it up, and left it and the container with the spider-thing outside in the courtyard. Then I went back into the archive.

After a bit of digging, I found what I was looking for. A jar, one of the old glass ones with an antique seal, dusty from years spent sitting in the corner, repeatedly forgotten every time the recycling came around. With the spider thing inside it, and the alcohol in place, it might as well have never been broken. The solution was already starting to cloud. 

I could have resisted. I’m certain of that. But honestly, the thing seemed to want to move on, and by that point I was more than happy to speed it on its way. I don’t need to explain why I thought to send it to you. Either you actually deal with things like this, and will know what to do with it, or you don’t, and I’ll have given you the first genuine piece of supernatural nastiness you’ve seen. Possibly the last, as well. 

Either way, it’s your problem now.

So you can stop sending me emails. 

**KAT**

Statement ends. It’s always such a pleasure to hear from our sister institute, even if this is the wrong place to file complaints. Their recruitment drive seems to be proceeding apace.

It’s always a pity when someone promising won’t share their talent. Selfish, some would say. And there’s always a risk that another side will poach them off us. But I don’t think there’s any need to worry about his turning into a spider freak, at least. 

What does worry me is the fact that this statement turned up so far away from home, and _ without _the jar it was supposedly attached to. The intake form lists both an artefact and a statement, but the statement was all I could find. 

If she had succeeded in hatching the jar, we would have had another Amalgam on our hands, and that’s always a pain. Why dear old Mother keeps trying to make them, I’ll never know. They’re always unstable, they always collapse, and they _ always _make a mess. Still. I suppose it’s nice to have a hobby. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Imperfect Specimen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20191831) by [Oak_Leaf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oak_Leaf/pseuds/Oak_Leaf)


End file.
